


Oh, Great Sights

by CourierNew



Category: Deltarune (Video Game), Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 08:32:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18465298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNew/pseuds/CourierNew
Summary: Asriel always enjoyed photography. Kris was his favorite subject.





	Oh, Great Sights

_(The first day: Kris standing beside the piano, Asriel’s camera flash reflected in the instrument’s black lacquered surface. Kris’ hair is a jagged bowl that consumes their head from the nose up; their shirt is clean but hangs halfway to their knees. They stand with clenched fists, back straightened firing-squad stiff. What can be seen of their face is that of someone terrified to disappoint.)_

When Asriel’s parents tell him that he’s going to have a new sibling, he spends whole nights wide awake staring at the newly-empty half of his room, imagining the possibilities. He hadn’t expected this. Not just the way they look, but their furtive shivering pose, the way they press up against the corner of every room or scratch their arms as if trying to dislodge insects from underneath the skin. When Kris poses for this picture, it’s the only time all week that they look Asriel directly. They regard everyone else sideways, squinting, like they’re trying to glimpse the sun.

_(Kris seated on the carpet, Asriel’s toys spread out around them. They hold a hand out to an action figure, hesitantly, as if afraid the plastic will crumble in their grip.)_

_(Kris on the piano bench beside Asgore. Both their backs are turned. Kris has started to wear clothes in Asriel’s shades of green and Asgore is in his floral summer shirt; the colors strike the eye like a toothache. Kris leans against their father. The back of their hair is neatly trimmed.)_

_(Kris just after school orientation, the glare of their backpack devouring half the photo. The sliver of Toriel’s hand is at the edge of the frame; a moment later, she will ruffle Kris’ hair. Kris grips the backpack’s straps tight. Their frown is contemplative. That night, when the two of them lie in bed, they ask Asriel why they’re so different from everyone else. Asriel can’t answer and the question dangles like a noose.)_

Throughout the years Asriel’s phones bloat with pictures, handed down from one model to the next. He’s an enthusiastic photographer but not a very talented one – his pictures are often smeared with stray light, badly framed, burdened with needless detail. He has a good sense of timing, always quick to fumble out his phone when there’s a moment to be captured, but he can’t catch everything.

Not pictured: the way Kris’ breath would rattle and gasp in the late hours, loud enough to wake Asriel up; the livid scratchmarks on their arms in the earlier months; the twists of pulled hair on the pillow. Asriel is forced to re-evaluate things. He’d thought a sibling was like a friend that stayed at your house all the time, but this is something weightier. One night he pads over to Kris’ bed as they thrash and pant in their sleep and takes Kris’ grasping hand in his own until at last they settle. Asriel looks at this sleeping shape. He’s still young; his head aches with budding horns. He can’t put words to the responsibility he feels.

_(Kris’ first birthday cake, chocolate with marshmallow icing. Their disheveled head crests over the candles; the beetle-shine of one awestruck eye can be seen behind their bangs. They eat until they spasm from sugar rush and lay groaning in bed all next day.)_

_(Kris in front of the picture window, hands on their horns, fingers out as if testing their sharpness. Behind them the sun is setting and the vermilion glare blends with the horns themselves until they’re nearly invisible. They’re smiling, a little.)_

Not pictured: the way that smile would sharpen in the coming years, turn bitter at the edges.

_(Kris huddled under a tablecloth at the church potluck, three slices of cake spread out before them like temple offerings. Their suit is smeared with icing. They have a finger to their lips. Asriel takes the picture and drops the tablecloth and says nothing.)_

_(Kris at the edge of Catty’s roof, arms outstretched. The sun hangs between their horns like a diadem; the glare consumes their face. They climbed up the tree beside Catty’s house while Asriel played lookout and when they took the leap Asriel stayed quiet even as he felt a hot iron twist in his gut. The neighbors call and when Toriel arrives she screams Kris’ name loud enough to echo down the block. They give no explanation even though their grounding. Asriel’s classmates start to whisper. You don’t understand, he wants to tell them. You didn’t see them when they first came home.)_

_(Kris with a missing tooth, pulling the side of their mouth to show the bloody hole. Their face is stained sunset-purple. The other side of their mouth still has that wicked scythe of a grin.)_

Not pictured: Dess Holiday, lean and shaggy-headed and always with the impression of a high-tension spring about to snap, appearing around a corner sudden as a cold wind. The red blur of their plastic bat cracking against Kris’ face and the red spattering the sidewalk below. Asriel holds the bat at bay as the adults come running and Dess shouts at him about Noelle’s sleepless nights, the way she never stops checking underneath the bed. He tells Asriel to take the freak back where they found it and then they both feel heavy hands on their shoulders and no one says anything more. Kris is still on their back, grinning through the blood.

Phone calls go on for days. They don’t see the Holidays again for weeks. Asgore no longer plays the piano; he seems wary of crossing Toriel’s path. There is a feeling of fracturing in the air.

_(Kris, Asgore, and Toriel at the diner, seated in the usual booth. Asriel returns from washing his hands and takes this picture too quickly, before the lens can adjust; the sunlight from the window washes it out like over-exposed film. Asgore’s hulking frame is barely seen beside Kris, sitting across from Toriel. Their parents are smiling but it’s strained, wilted, like clotheslines left in the rain. Kris’ face is neutral. The horns and Gerson are both long gone.)_

Kris’ grin becomes hard to find.

_(Kris in one of Asriel’s sweaters, almost new – he’s outgrowing clothes so fast – standing on the bright patch of the carpet where the piano used to be.)_

_(Kris on the first day of the school year, Toriel’s arm encircling them. She has to bend down to fit herself into the frame; she beams at the camera. Kris’ mouth is a crooked line.)_

_(Kris at their father’s flower shop. They stayed there all day that day but no customers came. Asgore is out, picking up dinner; the two of them roam the place like ghosts. Kris stands with two fingers shoved into a flowerpot’s soft earth. Their head is bowed, a mourner’s pose.)_

Asriel spends as much time as he can with them, even as his schoolwork piles up and his legs burn from track practice. He heard his classmates mutter about the creepy kid’s constant stare but he knows they just aren’t paying close enough attention, that while Kris’ face may be different from before there is still a whole spectrum to those placid frowns – this one wry, this one sardonic, this one as if witnessing the shell of something burnt forever.

_(Christmas. Kris kneels between Noelle and Rudy Holiday, a minefield of wrapping-paper shreds around them. The tree sparkles in the background like junk jewelry. Off to the side are Kris’ presents – bags of pricy chocolates, most of which will be eaten by the new year. Rudy grins the widest. His cheeks are slightly sunken.)_

Not pictured: strikethroughs on the calendar moving far too fast, counting down to the day when Asriel leaves home. That Christmas is a quiet one. Their father comes and goes, his conversation with Toriel politely terse. Mrs. Holiday has other appointments; Dess is already away; Rudy can’t stop coughing. The air is choked with questions left unasked. By the time everyone goes home, Toriel’s cheer has turned badly brittle.

Asriel goes to his room and works on his college applications and as the hour ticks past midnight Kris still hasn’t come to bed. He steps out into the darkened hall and sees Kris sitting at the picture window, having dragged one of the kitchen chairs over; they stare out the darkened glass with a cat’s intensity. Asriel searches for something to say, and then takes his own chair and sits beside Kris. The minutes tick past. Neither of them speak. He would take Kris’ hand but those days are already gone. At one point he thinks he glimpses something thrashing in the outer dark beyond the house and glances over to Kris for some acknowledgement of it, but they don’t meet his eye and when he turns back to the window he can’t see a thing.

_(Kris at the lake just after the thaw, standing at the bank with hands in pockets. They’re wearing one of Asriel’s hoodies, the horn-holes stitched up, and the light reflected off the water dapples across the purple fabric like a cut amethyst.)_

_(Kris, in the same pose, but head turned to face Asriel. They’ve noticed the camera. They attempt to smile.)_

_(Kris facing the camera full-on, hands still in pockets. Their smile is still there, faint like a secret. This is one of the few shots Asriel takes time to frame properly – the budding trees flanking his sibling, the mirrored pane of the water embracing them. The purple of their hoodie is like a shout in the soft woods. Smell of fresh earth and fish scale.)_

With the exception of this last picture, Asriel’s photography becomes even more amateur in these latter, stranger days. His shots tilt and skew, the images unfocused, marred with glitch. Often he photographs Kris two, three times in quick succession, so that the photos are identical save for the least deviation in their posture or the curls of their hair. Something is wrong with the camera. He can no longer focus properly on Kris’ silhouette; his eyes fight to slide away. He takes these duplicate shots as though layering them atop one another will again lend Kris solidity. As if these years of pictures will form some assemblance of a yet-unrecognized whole.

What is there to be done, he thinks. What to say. How to break the years of careful silence they’ve cultivated. Kris breathes easy around him even as they recede from everyone else; they keep receding, pulling away from the world. Asriel continues to run, his trophies pile up (not pictured: Kris’ face on the bleachers during his track meets, hanging over him and the other runners like the moon), but Kris seems to revert back into the mute and frightened thing that had first entered his home – and further back than that, into someone that he can’t recognize or understand.

But his parents have their own troubles, his classmates shrug and say that they were always a freak, and Asriel keeps these photos to himself no matter how much they accumulate, evidence of a degradation in this town that he’s at once eager to leave and scared of leaving Kris within.

_(Kris in front of the church, after Asriel’s final performance in the choir. They come to watch him sing but otherwise haven’t stepped inside in years. The sky promises heavy rain and the clouds are the color of an anvil. Kris’ head is angled up, towards the unseen steeple, a scratch of deeper dark against the approaching storm. The air is tanged with ozone. Kris doesn’t move until Asriel tugs his wrist.)_

Not pictured: the shadows that seem to move when he’s not looking.

Not pictured: the church door that rattled when he passed it in the night.

Not pictured: a sickly sensation of everything curdled.

_(Kris at the side of the road, the purple of his hoodie once again garish against the greenery. They’d followed Toriel’s car, laden heavy with Asriel’s luggage, as she’d driven him out of town to his college orientation. The photo is so askew it’s almost diagonal, so that Kris looks about to fall off the world; they have a hand half-raised in a hesitant wave and their face is once again inscrutable. This picture is followed by another like it, and another, and another still, Asriel desperately hitting the shutter to capture something he still can’t put into words because the alternative is to tell his mother to turn the car around and that he knows is something even Kris wouldn’t want, Kris wants to watch him run, and so Asriel tries his best to reach out with this camera and pull something of Kris along with him even as the road becomes horizon and the town fades from view and Kris himself recedes completely, fingers curling, hand lowering, until finally they’re gone for good.)_

There is nothing else after this day.

_(Kris, before the horns, before the bat and the funeral and the unbroken choking silences – just a few months after they had first come home, when they still held onto Asriel like a lifeline and wouldn’t take his toys until they were offered. They had asked him to take a photo of them with their parents and he’d grabbed his phone so fast he’d almost broken it, getting Toriel and Asgore all into the room. When he tells them to say cheese his parents instead reach down and sweep Kris up into their arms, Toriel planting a kiss on their cheek, Asgore burying them in his beard, and that’s when Asriel hits the shutter – Kris held aloft, legs kicking, their pale face aglow with laughter.)_

This is the one Asriel returns to most – when he checks his phone at night as the mundane dark presses against his window, at once hoping for and dreading calls from home, looking down into the screen as though he could fall forward into these memories like water and salvage the person that his sibling had maybe once wished to become.

**Author's Note:**

> The structure of this fic is based on Blake Butler's excellent short story "Water Damaged Photos of Our Home Before I Left It."
> 
> Thank you for reading.


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